Social media has reshaped the way people communicate and interact with each other. Lately, people share ideas, insights, thoughts, opinions, and perspectives on platforms like Facebook & Instagram.
With a tremendous increment in the current social media trend of 4.2 billion active users in January 2021, consumer behaviors have changed.
So, what are the effects of social media marketing on brand awareness? How have social media helped brands achieve their set marketing goals? Facebook is responsible for 34% of global brand awareness.
The platform and others, such as Instagram, allow direct online communication between companies and customers, leading to more engagement and wider audience reach.
Social Media Concepts
People gain knowledge, read information, and share content with other people through social media platforms. Below are the three concepts of social media
● Technology Circulation For Everyone
Social media is not restricted to a single individual, nor is it restricted to a particular location. Social media is free to access as long as you have an internet connection. Everyone is permitted to create, connect, and share content with anyone online on a social media platform.
● Diffusion Of Information
Social media shares more information quickly within a snap of a finger compared to traditional media. Online social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter offer a significantly low-cost service compared to traditional media.
Traditional media usually promote and advertise products and services through one-way communication channels like newspapers, magazines, televisions, and radios. But social media platforms offer multiple communication channels, usually between two or more users in real-time. Also, to leverage better results from traditional media, social media QR codes can be displayed with the traditional media content making it also a two-way communication
● Building Of Relationship
Social media platforms enable brands to build solid customer relationships through easy communication. They can achieve this through discussions, community, connection, participation, and openness.
Why Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing enables brands to reach millions of potential customers at lower costs. It also facilitates real-time interactions between brand representatives and their customers or clients.
Additionally, social media marketing facilitates brand awareness and development since the platforms also serve as grounds for in-depth research into consumer behavioral patterns.
Social media platforms provide the tools and techniques to create, communicate, deliver, exchange, and sell products or services to consumers or partners. These platforms also achieve business objectives like customer engagement, identifying purchase intention, and loyalty.
Types of Social media Contents
It is very paramount to know the types of social media content to understand how to use them in your marketing campaign. However, the two main primary social media content are user-generated and marketer-generated. Both of these contents can be used for brand awareness and recognition.
● Marketer Generated Content
A marketer-generated content (MGC) is a type of content marketing content created and managed by the brand to enable effective social media communication. Most content used by a marketer is owned by the brand. This includes text, images, and videos. This brand content is usually found on the company-owned website.
● User-Generated Content
These are content created by customers and users, but not business brands or companies. This volunteer content comes in the form of wikis, blogs, tweets, images, audio, and video for social media posts.
The user-generated content is very effective and can facilitate brand awareness. These contents build online communities and engage them in discussions.
Both brand-generated content and user-generated content can be used to boost brand awareness. By merging the two, a company can reach more people.
While some social media users may believe a company will say only great things about its services, they won’t say the same for users who write about such brands.
That’s why buyers rely on online forums and user reviews on products to decide on which brand to choose or not. So a company aiming to increase brand awareness should utilize both types of content effectively in its marketing approach.
Social Media Marketing Effects on Brand Awareness
Using social media for marketing offers many benefits, such as having millions of followers and a large target audience. Other benefits include:
● Direct Communication
Social media platforms enable the sharing, liking, and exchanging of content between customer communities or between a single individual and a brand. Many brands already have various accounts on these platforms to communicate directly with their customers.
Brands can discuss with prospective customers or clients on these platforms to identify their pain points and offer the right solutions. Also, customers can interact with brands directly to air their views, report their grievances, and gain the solution they want.
● Timely And Immediate Reach
Real-time communication enables marketers to obtain trending customer insight anytime. By that, brands can send relevant messages at the right time.
Also, social media is a tool that enables brands to collect customer feedback. This will allow brands to craft appropriate marketing campaigns to reach their target customers.
● Interactive
Social media platforms enable two-way communication. It encourages relationship building between a company and its customers. Marketers engage in a conversation with prospective clients on social media to generate valuable feedback. Instead of waiting days to get feedback on a request or complaint, customers can chat directly in real-time with a brand’s customer care representative.
● Cost-Effective
Based on the objectives and ability of the company, social media marketing has a high outcome with a low cost. Marketing through social media platforms tends to be cheaper than marketing through traditional media like newspapers and TV.
Since small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) cannot afford a big budget like large companies, they settle for social media adverts.
Also, when you do social media advertisements, you can even buy Facebook comments that you can’t find on traditional media.
● Sharing Capability and Social Engagement
Brands can develop virtual communities on social media channels. The aim is to enable members to share information, communicate easily, boost brand visibility, and share experiences. This causes members to share content to promote the brand.
● Measure and Track
A good feature of social media sites is that brands can open a competitor’s site and measure or track their progress. The information will enable them to correct what they’re failing on their site. Also, social media metrics and analytics tell a brand how well they do.
Conclusion
Social media platforms enable a high level of online brand exposure. By engaging in social media marketing, brands can reach millions of users in real time and at a low cost.
This approach boosts brand visibility and awareness, increasing communication, engagement, patronage, and revenue. It also enables brands to stay relevant in the competitive business environment.
Examples of social media platforms suitable for brand awareness include Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. By offering a level playing field, small and medium-scale businesses can use social media platforms to compete with multinational companies.